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p>the only problem was that 2 years before, it had 2 billion in sales.  it was getting killed.  by walmart.  it was losing market share against the other toy companies.  

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p>and walmart is really short for “lots of people liked that walmart sold toys more cheaply, so they could buy health care and education and rent and gas and food and stuff.”  

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p>customers killed kb.  bain took a risky flier to see if it could turn things around.  failed.  

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p>irony – you posit kbt as the victim.  

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p>a few years before Bain bought KB, KB bought etoys.  remember them?  probably not.  dot com which hit the roof and flamed out.  but at one time they had maybe 500 to 1000 employees.  they all lost their jobs.  

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p>in your world, is that big bad KB toys’ fault?  all those 700 people?  so if the CEO of kb ran for office, you’d say HE’D gotten rid of 700 jobs?  

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p>*

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p>i don’t disagree with your larger assessment – pags woke up one day and thought since wyc is getting all the credit for running the celts, maybe he could be a senator.  

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p>

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p>I see no evidence that Bain bought them as a “risky flier.” It appears to me that Bain did with KB what they have done with so many other struggling companies –

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p>1. Buy into a distressed company, usually with loans secured by the few assets left in the target company.
2. Sell off whatever assets can be sold, strip out any cash left, layoff the employees.
3. Sell the remnants (or force a bankruptcy) and get out.

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p>If you want the gory details, look at the portfolio companies Bain has “invested” in. Not just AmPad and KB — look at Bain’s long history. Bear in mind, though, that you’ll have to dig. The public face of each of these deals was surely very positive. When the dust settles, it’s always “unfortunate” that the target company had to be “restructured.”

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p>Bain is no friend of the worker.

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p>Secondly, there is no claim — implicit or explicit — that KB Toys was “healthy”. Instead, there is the following paragraph:

But here are a few pesky facts that get in the way of that statement: when Pags and Bain bought KB Toys the company, then had annual sales estimated at $1.5 billion and a year-round workforce of 13,000. Bain decisions caused the debt that brought the company to bankruptcy.

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p>The statements about sales and workforce size are simple statements of fact — there is no characterization of them. Most importantly, there is no statement about the cost side of the balance sheet. A company with sales of $1.5B might have costs of $1.8B for that same year, and would be sick indeed. Merely stating annual sales and number of employees is not saying anything about the health of the company.

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p>This recital of facts is followed by a statement about who created the debt that ultimately bankrupted the company. On the face of it, the statement appears true. The debt was, in fact, incurred after Bain’s takeover. Bain was, in fact, in control of the company when the debt was taken on.

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p>If the company had been “healthy”, Bain would NOT have been interested.

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p>The company was in trouble, and Bain exploited the resulting weakness to strip it of whatever value it had left.

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p>Defend Bain and companies like it if you must — but don’t try and pretend that they do anything constructive for workers.

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p>The cynicism of Mr. Pagliuca’s campaign strategy about creating jobs is a breathtaking. His history with Bain paints a more accurate picture of his values and his attitudes towards working men and women.

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p>I suggest that questions about how a person achieves wealth and power are just as important as their attainment — especially when considering that person as a candidate for public office.